BY ORDER OF THE CZAR. 229
It was a lovely night. There was not a ripple on the water by the quay, nor outside the bar. He wondered if she had come aboard, or if she would ; wondered with a strange feeling of curiosity ; and one moment he hoped she would not, and the next he hoped she would.
All at once, when he thought of Dolly Norcott, he felt wretched ; then as suddenly a sense of triumph crept into his troubled brain. To have held the woman of the opera in his arms ! To have stirred the heart of the woman with that sadly beautiful, inscrutable face ! To have her promise that they should meet again ! To have her confession that there had been a time when she could have loved him ! This was tantamount to an encouragement to believe that there might be a time in the future when she would return his love ! All this was delightful ; and yet it was a delight that he felt he had no right to embrace. It was the same kind of delight that belonged to the tragic bliss of Francesca and her lover in. the story ; and it was wrong ; his was a worse crime then theirs. He was en- gaged to be married to a sweet and innocent girl. On his way to join her, he had entirely and sinfully forgotten her. He experienced a sudden contempt for himself. For a moment it occurred to him to reflect whether he might not be justified in disappearing altogether from the sight of both women, and betake himself to some distant corner of the globe, the world forgetting, by the world forgot.
The pleasant breeze that sprung up when the boat was under weigh, refreshed him, and he paced the deck, steadied with a modified sense of the enormity of his conduct. He began to philosophize about it, and to find excuses for himself. A man is not responsible for the out- burst of these sudden attacks of passion, especially if he has been endowed by nature with an excess of feeling, with the temperament of the poet, and who has had no relf-restraining influences abon* him, no mentor to check
